Recently, one of my children asked me a question about the definition of ‘celebrity’ as found on their iPad. The definition that gave rise to the question is: a famous person, especially in entertainment or sport.

And the question that was posed to me is: As far as you’re aware, does the use of ‘especially’ in that definition connote that the word ‘celebrity’ should typically only be used for entertainers and sports figures?

I began by encouraging him to eschew the word ‘celebrity’ due to its strong association and commonality with ‘celebrate,’ particularly because there have been very few humans who have been worthy of being celebrated, and to a near certainty, almost none today with that appellation. Continuing, I told him that in the main, his interpretation was correct, but that there was a caveat for those who become known outside of entertainment or sport (or who increase the scope of their recognition beyond the confines of region or type such as a Bollywood actor becoming known outside of Bollywood films or a sports figure of say, American basketball, becoming known worldwide). I also avoid using the term ‘star’ to refer to the personalities of TV and film because there is something to be gained of eternal worth by gazing upon and contemplating the stars, whereas in the case of our earthbound cheap imitations, no such treasure is to be found. Real stars, for all practical purposes, don’t fade: of all of the stars visible in the universe, during the course of a natural lifetime, zero, or near zero (and certainly 0%) of them will ‘fade’ away.

The phenomenon of name recognition is of course not limited to the here and now¹In surveying the voting habits of the typical inhabitant of the ostensible democracies of Christendom over the past 60 or so years, one could almost be forgiven for believing that the here and now is all that there is. with the critical difference being that those names, by and large²Notable exceptions being the rogues and villains of history., that have come down to us from the ages did so due to some estimable quality of character, actual merit, or accomplishment, which, prior to the mid-20th century was known to all but the most ignorant and illiterate. What was not known was the trivia of their lives, for it is trivial, and no sensible and sober-minded person could be bothered with it. By contrast, today, we have what amounts to, in essence, a complete inversion: the vast majority of names that are familiar are known not for quality of character³When character itself has been declared to be relative, well then everyone is a person of character, and so it becomes an exercise in futility to attempt to distinguish one from another in any meaningful and qualitative way., not for actual merit, nor for true accomplishment but rather specifically for trivia, for adornment, for lack of character, with the only accomplishment being the degree to which one exemplifies such traits⁴Sports figures are an exception to this. Not that in general their characters are any better today, but in true sport, there can be no success without discipline and hard work.. In keeping with this, today, with rare exception, the only thing we have to accompany the name is trivia. It matters not whether the name resides in the vault of time or in the ether of the moment.

To wit: the ratio of those who understand, even in a limited sense, or who have done something beyond the passive imbibement of what the glowing screen tells them of the lives of such as Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, to those who recognize those names is infinitesimal. Respectively, they are known for 'being the guy who had an apple drop on his head,' the 'guy with crazy hair who was super smart.' They both did something with ‘science,’ but few can remember what, even dimly. Nor of course are they able to articulate what science is.

The same could be said of the great figures from art. Beethoven serves here as the quintessential example: the number of those who have carefully listened to any of his works in their entirety in comparison to those who recognize his name or have only heard the first few bars of the magnificent Fifth, is vanishingly small. The same goes with knowledge of his life: the ratio is the same as the previous of those who have read a book on the man versus those who ‘know’ he was ‘that deaf composer guy.’ And so it goes with the likes of Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, et al.

Of historical figures examples such as Alexander 'the Great,' Julius Caesar, and Napoleon are 'known,' but what is known varies from person to person based upon the number of movies they've watched.

Of those of more recent memory we have sports figures such as Michael Jordan and Lebron James from basketball, Michael Schumacher and Max Verstappen from Formula 1, Tom Brady from American football, Valentino Rossi from MotoGP, Pelé and David Beckham from soccer, and Muhammed Ali and Tyson Fury from boxing. If you live in the United States and your fare of sporting material consists of what the big networks in the United States regularly broadcast, then some of these names may not be recognized, but what can be said of all of them is that they have distinguished themselves through discipline, hard work, and resilience in their chosen endeavors, so in that sense at least, they are worthy of some approbation.

Pelé for me serves as a particularly suitable example of the phenomenon under consideration. Perusing a list of the 50 greatest soccer players of all time, I only recognized the name of Pelé: I've never been a fan of soccer (although as a boy I enjoyed playing it immensely), yet I know of Pelé.⁵Full disclosure: there were two other names I recognized, 'Kaka' and 'Socrates.' But I didn't associate either with the game of soccer.

We also have 'celebrities' who have entered the collective consciousness, but unlike those in the previous lists who were or are exemplars of accomplishment and preeminence in their respective fields or endeavors, these have done so due to their support of morally reprehensible beliefs and practices. Names such as

• Carl Sagan
• Colin Kaepernick
• Neil deGrasse Tyson (NDT)
• Richard Dawkins
• Christopher Hitchens⁶Perhaps not fair to include him here, for he was a witty and accomplished writer in his own right, but I think he really entered the collective consciousness of the West due to the religiosity of his atheistic beliefs, and he certainly doesn't belong to the pantheon of great English writers and essayists.

immediately spring to mind.

The PhD - Intro

In mentioning NDT to my son and conveying that he is a well-known disseminator of science and pseudoscience trivia who happens to have a PhD, I was faced with trying to illustrate how the possession of a PhD is a guarantor of neither knowledge, nor relevance, nor utility. We do cover these things in passing from time to time, but in this instance, I tried to illustrate with a metaphor. What I told him was the following:

Some PhDs are awarded to those who have built and designed an entire home: they architected it, cut the lumber from the trees, ground the glass, forged the hinges, put in the plumbing and electrical systems, hung the doors, roofed it, and sealed it against the elements. Most PhDs (such as NDT's) are bestowed upon those who upon being given the blueprints and records regarding the house built by another and spending years to peruse and digest the information thereof, upon discovering a window pane with a smudge on it, whip out the Windex and paper towels and fix it right up. The PhD is then awarded.

In an interview conducted by Michael Dirda published by the Washington Post, Walter Jackson Bate touched upon these types of incremental and ultimately superfluous PhD bestowals, in this case, the field of literary criticism and the zeal for being 'published,' illustrated by a zealous aspirant musing while tapping (‘cracking’) his pipe on a table -

Unless you’ve spent at least a little time investigating literary criticism, textual criticism, or perhaps even historiography, the relevance of the previous would be understandably elusive. All of those fields used to have merit, but as is the case of just about every other edifice in academia established and built by Christians, it has been overrun by barbarians. What Professor Bate was communicating is the idea that the vast majority of PhDs awarded in the field of literature are simply hack jobs in which no new knowledge of worth or operative principle has been conveyed, but rather something more akin to a trivial increment to work already done by others. For example, using Gauss Summation, we can easily calculate that the sum of the integers from 1 to 100 inclusive is 5050⁷Karl Friedrich Gauss, by common report, came up with the formula n*(n+1)/2 when he was but seven years old.. ‘My’ PhD thesis is that we can come up with a new formula wherein for any number x, we can calculate the sum of the integers from 1 to x added to x thusly: x*(x+1)/2 + x. It’s not exactly this trivial, but in the main, the typical PhD thesis introduces no new information that is not merely a trivial increment in nature.

NDT Intro - Ne Supra Crepidam⁸'not beyond the shoe'

From the time that I first became aware of NDT, I was not a fan, primarily because in that encounter, he was doing his best to defend some immoral practice using sentiment cloaked in supposed science and reason. But boy, did he sound good. It reminded me of my initial experience upon hearing Gavin Newsome speak: it was over the radio and I didn’t know who it was that was speaking, but what I did know is that I was simultaneously both awed and repulsed, for Newsome is as slick as they come, slithering his way into the ‘open minds’ of the masses carrying a cargo of the most horrific moral atrocities imaginable. NDT’s actually better, because Newsome’s cargo, despite the silkiness of his delivery, is glaringly obvious to any who are not completely devoid of even sporadic periods of focus with an interest in what’s happening in their state or country. NDT’s delivery comes across as much more sincere, and it is stamped with the authority of a PhD and ‘science.’ The fundamental problem is that he does proceed along rational lines some of the time, but then either he loses the rational thread, or switches effortlessly to unfounded premises and continues on his way. In essence, if one is not paying proper attention, it’s understandable that most people don’t know where the reason ends and NDT begins. Bearing that in mind, I was also repulsed because he additionally struck me as a jovial and insipid fool who dispenses with fundamental analysis and principle in a flippant manner whenever someone is there to clap him on the back, give him some sort of award, or call him a ‘sensible fellow.’ I essentially had the same reaction to Carl Sagan, although his views on pressing moral issues, while abhorrent, were not as expansive as are NDT's. Primarily, I have little doubt, due to the time in which Sagan was in the ascendancy, still having at least given lip service to the standards of human behavior established in the West by Christianity. NDT is, in some respects, akin to a dancing monkey for the unlettered public: as long as they throw him peanuts, he’ll dance whatever routine is requested⁹Considering that NDT manifests both European and African traits, if comparing him to a dancing monkey is ‘racist’ then it’s equally an insult to Europeans as it is to Africans. Either way, the charge is balderdash for it's a well-known idiom that has nothing to do with race and I refuse to let the unhinged dictate the terms of engagement.. I’m with Dr. Johnson here who rightly despised cant¹⁰Samuel Johnson, English essayist, compiler of the first complete English dictionary. The only English author whose words are quoted more than Dr. Johnson's are Shakespeare's..

Kinship with the Cosmos

Hence, just about every opinion held and broadcast by NDT will not go against the grain, but will instead be crafted such that it will be applauded by the Fourth Estate. The problem is not being applauded, nor having an opinion of course, the problem is having an uncritical opinion of the most superficial kind passed off as science. NDT’s statements typically reflect and are imbued with the same intellectual rigor and scientific gravity as are the statements of other pop scientists e.g., Richard Dawkins. Typically, they are emotionally satisfying to those not accustomed to analysis who have an axe to grind in support of some abhorrent moral, financial, or geopolitical cause. An example? Here is NDT's panegyric to the universe on why each and every one of us is just so special:

'Saccharine' is what immediately comes to mind here. He is here answering the question ‘Do we matter?’, where the ‘we’ means the human race. So, NDT's answer to "Does the human race matter?" consists of:

• The Big Bang gave rise to stars.
• Those stars eventually exploded and scattered their atoms into the universe.
• The atoms of our body (and in fact everything in or on the earth) can be traced back to those stars and the Big Bang.
• Our body is literally stardust.
• The universe lives within our body.
• Because our body is made of stardust, we have kinship with the cosmos.

If the previous is valid, we can easily substitute 'cow dung'¹¹The world view of the unhinged is more detestable, and far more destructive than cow dung. If one has a visceral reaction to cow dung, that reaction should be greater for the world view that leads to the murder and mutilation of those created in the image of God amongst a whole host of other evils. It is the chaotic world view espoused by such as NDT that has led to the literal explosion and scattering of fecal matter upon the streets of every major city in the United States by an ever-increasing homeless population created by that same world view. There is a strong connection here. for 'our body' in the previous, and get an equally valid set of statements:

• The Big Bang gave rise to stars.
• Those stars eventually exploded and scattered their atoms into the universe.
• The atoms of cow dung (and in fact everything in or on the earth) can be traced back to those stars and the Big Bang.
• Cow dung is literally stardust.
• The universe lives within cow dung.
• Because cow dung is made of stardust, cow dung has kinship with the cosmos.

By a simple transitive relation, we are therefore led ineluctably to conclude that we have kinship with cow dung. Kind of puts our ‘kinship’ with the stars into perspective, doesn’t it? Also, it'd be hard to argue that it doesn't put the damper on any elation we might feel upon having first heard that the universe 'lives' within us. Kinship with cow dung¹²Given his predilection for shallow thought, I have little doubt that the logical outworking of his statements never occurred to him. might make NDT feel 'large,' but I feel neither large nor small at his 'revelatory' insight: I simply feel a bit repulsed, and can only conclude that NDT is rather large in his capacity for sputtering out nonsense. This type of bilge is not something NDT has said a single time and then regretted, he seems to repeat some variant of it across many talks and speeches. If it doesn't appear in any of his pop science books, I would be quite surprised.

Continuing with our current example, NDT, like many of the unhinged, doesn't seem to be too interested in the meanings of words, and exhibits a strong Why Not? tendency. Telling people that they're special because they're the same as everyone (and everything!) else is the antithesis of a discriminating mind. Without going too far afield: no one can be accounted ‘special’ absent a mind outside of that person declaring them to be such, and wanting to be considered 'special' after the manner implied by NDT, is the antithesis of humility. No educated person can listen to NDT and not have a visceral reaction tending in the direction of disgorgement.

Inanity Spectrum

Another example of one of the enrichments scattered by NDT is this pearl of wisdom:

My default response to such statements as that tends to be a sardonic one, but I will refrain. As to the 'insufficiency' of the XX-YY chromosomes, when one is faced with assertions and contentions void of even the pretense of reason and reality, I confess it is a struggle. What can be said is that what Alan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind "The woman’s movement is not founded on nature. Although feminism sees the position of women as a result of nurture and not nature, its’ crucial contention is that biology should not be destiny, and biology is surely natural." applies here. The transvestite assault upon civilization is certainly not founded on nature, which means not founded on science. NDT all but confirms that his statements about the gender ‘spectrum’ are not scientific in a dialog he had with Ben Shapiro wherein Shapiro has to essentially explain to NDT that people engaging in a particular deviant behavior is a phenomenon, but simply because something is manifest to the senses, does not mean that there is a 'science' behind it. NDT is flummoxed a bit and then capitulates: whether the fact that people engage in deviant behavior “is something you want to put in a sociology class or a science class, maybe that remains to be determined." The difference here is that with Shapiro, he was engaging with someone who wasn’t simply going to hang on to his every word and fawn all over him. It’s also amusing that NDT lets slip that sociology is not a science. NDT presents himself as a scientist, but it is these types of utterances and the previous, which give the lie to that. As to NDT's 'bow,' suffice it to say that NDT needs to read some books on American history written by reputable historians prior to the 1970s, or pretty much anything written by Forrest McDonald. Or even The Federalist Papers. If he did, he would learn at least two things:

1. The Declaration of Independence is a historical document, not a legal document as is the Constitution. What Thomas Jefferson wrote in the former is neither binding nor a guarantee.
2. Even if the Declaration of Independence were to be considered a legal document, the 'pursuit of happiness' has nothing to do with the sexually deviant doing as they please in the midst of decent society. It has to do with the acquisition of property.

One wonders whether NDT would countenance the proposition that DNA is insufficient to say everything about one's race? What if one day I feel like exaggerating my 'blackness' in order to be able to get an affirmative action boost to my college application? And then on another day, exaggerate my 'nativeness' to gain access to government funds allocated for Indians? Somewhere, somewhere I read, that the United States is a land where I have the pursuit of happiness. And when I exaggerate various aspects of the DNA that 'assigned' me just one race, it makes me happy. Race exists on a spectrum, and I can declare whatever I want, whenever I want¹³Sardonic as charged. I did refrain for a couple of paragraphs..

My guess is that he wouldn't. By definition, consistency is not the forte of the unhinged.

Losing the Thread

In a final example that will serve to illustrate NDT's propensity for losing or discarding the rational thread, we have him in a dialog with Ben Shapiro in which the discussion eventually turned to murder, in particular, the murder of those humans who have not yet been born, wherein NDT stated:

• "Is whether abortions are legal or not up to majority vote in a society?"
• "Most fertilized eggs in a woman are spontaneously aborted."
• "And so, so, what do you do about that? Do you want to create an incubation chamber so that every spontaneously aborted fertilized egg gets put in there and grows to a human? Otherwise you'll get arrested for murder?"

Some thoughts:

• Again, NDT should do some reading on history. Democracies have instituted some of the most barbaric and horrific practices under the sun. A democracy will lend its assent to anything.
• The discussion of murder in the womb is not about the preservation of life in general, but rather turns upon the willful and unnecessary ending of the life of a human being who has committed no crime. NDT disingenuously (perhaps cluelessly) turns that into a point about the non-purposeful termination of a pregnancy that comes about without human will. He then informs us that that is ‘science’ speaking its wisdom into the debate.

Ultra NDT

Just as NDT's propensity for error seems to take him to infinity and beyond¹⁴The name of NDT's latest book is To Infinity and Beyond: A Journey of Cosmic Discovery., like a true ultracrepidarian, there seems to be no limit to the range of topics upon which he is willing to pontificate superficially. The homosexual profanation of marriage? The ever-changing climate change power play? Theology? Biology? The list goes on and on. Because the deer-eyed public is as ignorant of these topics and others as they are of science, his 'scientist' label lends gravity to every word he speaks, no matter how nonsensical it is. While it is true that NDT is not a scientist, what is he? He is in fact a scientism cleric, and as such, the statements he makes comport with what George Bernard Shaw said of it: "The iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid." In the same interview referenced above in which NDT tells us that we have kinship with cow dung, he relates the following: "The cosmic perspective is incompatible with your ego. I should say: your ego is incompatible with the cosmic perspective. That's the proper way to order that sentence." Is it the proper way to order the sentence because of the strictures of his faith, or is it because the universe will punish NDT for not being reverential? Whatever the reason behind NDT’s worship of creation, it flies in the face of his hero Richard Dawkins’ summation of the universe as being “nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” In the 19th century, John Ruskin coined the idiom ‘pathetic fallacy’ which, due to “an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational,” creates “a falseness in all our impressions of external things.” The pathetic fallacy is strong in the votaries of scientism.

All of the previous having been said, I am thoroughly convinced that NDT is a man who is quite intelligent, and that that intelligence is manifested in an aptitude for abstraction as well as information retention. While it is true, as will be explored in detail below, that academic standards have fallen precipitously over the past five to six decades, and are still falling, degrees in math, physics, and the engineering sciences still have a high enough abstraction and information retention barrier to graduating, that I don't believe that NDT's degree is fraudulent: as of this writing, one cannot fake one's way through the type of advanced math and physics classes that are required. My gut feel is that when it comes to mathematics and physics, NDT has just enough of an aptitude for abstraction to have made it through the program, but he has more than enough of an aptitude for information retention. In watching hours of NDT conversing with a variety of talk show hosts, people such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, internet personalities, and news anchors, I'm convinced that his strongest gifts are the gift of gab and an ability to remember a whole lot of information on a variety of subjects. He has an excellent grasp of the products of astrophysics, and he can relay high-level information about them very well.

He also knows how to work an audience and a host. He has spoken of the detailed research he has done prior to appearing on certain talk shows in order to not be 'outmaneuvered' by the host. Pretty impressive, and I don't think there's anything wrong with being as prepared as possible for any public appearance. Considering that his 'public' consists primarily of purported atheists and other hangers-on, it is not surprising that he comes across as both pompous and humble, always a telltale sign of a shyster, for the feigned humility will get points with some of his acolytes, and the pomposity will get points with others. He will speak of wanting to appease and be reasonable, but then turn right around to make sure that everyone knows that he has 21 honorary doctorates, and further, that each one of those doctorates were testaments to him having achieved greatness. Predictably, the atheists in attendance were mighty impressed. In the same conversation with Dawkins he mentions a hypothetical society or city named Rationalia where people such as he and Richard Dawkins could become citizens. Upon hearing NDT mention this wonderful place, I was immediately reminded of when 30 or so years ago, the atheist Daniel Dennett attempted to start a dialectical trend where atheists would (because they should) be referred to as 'brights.' Just imagine, a city shining brightly on a hill lit solely by the starry intellects of those such as Dawkins and NDT showing the masses their way, their light, and their truth.

The typical reaction (what I refer to as the ‘pabulumium response’) to NDT’s statements on just about any topic of relevance remind me of past coworkers’ responses to Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, which the VP of engineering had purchased for the entire staff: “Oh, I didn’t need to really read much of it as he says what I already knew.” This spoken by adherents of the most prosaic atheism imaginable who have never encountered, much less delved into, epistemology, who could not articulate the difference between a syllogism and a paralogism if their life depended upon it, wholly ignorant of history, of philosophy, the aesthetic, in essence ignorant of every topic necessary to be accounted as educated. Once they had received their degree in one of the subjects requisite to engineering work, they considered themselves educated and from that point on, with rare exception, no book was cracked open other than those tied directly to their profession, their finance, or their chosen entertainments and hobbies. Don’t get me wrong, these are not unintelligent people, in fact, they are some of the brightest people I’ve ever encountered, but none of this changes the fact that they are uneducated, and they are what could be termed ‘one-trick ponies.’ They remind me of the 7’2” 300-pound kid I played basketball with in high school: by all accounts he could have been a pro, but the only ‘skill’ he developed in any way was to lumber down to the basket, get thrown the ball, and then score. This was the one skill (and not coincidentally, the bare minimum) deemed by him necessary to succeed in the environment in which he found himself, namely, a bunch of comparatively small six foot or so 175-pound high schoolers. He never put in the hard work necessary in order to manifest the skills to be a complete basketball player so that he could contribute to the team as a whole. And so it is with them: the bare minimum to ensure their pockets are filled with no concern for, or effort made to ensure that what was bequeathed to them by their forebears will exist for their children or grandchildren. That being said, as regards NDT, we must be always willing to state the truth, and if, despite all evidence to the contrary as evinced by his pabulum-like statements such as those above and many others, he is in fact a brilliant and accomplished scientist unlike the pseudoscientists such as Sagan or Dawkins, then we must acknowledge it. So, I endeavored to find out a bit more about the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The PhD/Tyson Bridge

In looking into Tyson's actual contribution to astrophysics, I saw that his 12-page thesis published in 1991 has been cited a grand total of 20 times in the ensuing three+ decades as of this writing, and that in a passing manner. This certainly does not strike me as an earth-shattering contribution. For comparison, I wondered "How many times has Freeman Dyson's thesis been cited?"¹⁵Considering the enormity and relevance of Dyson’s work in QED, I figured the list would be extensive. and was a bit surprised to discover that he had never obtained a PhD, and in fact, detested them:

Considering that the public school system in the United States was also modeled after the German one of the 19th century, and that its animating purpose was not in endeavoring to create good thinkers, but rather to create workers en masse who could read and retain instructions of varying complexities in order to more efficiently serve the industrialists, I found Dyson's insight into the PhD program illuminating. Perusing the landscape of academia, sadly, one cannot but be awed with how successful both of those German-led initiatives have been.

Systemic Racial Profiling

If the above wasn’t enough to give one pause in granting slavish obeisance unto the letters ‘p,’ ‘h,’ and ‘d,’ in the past 50-60 years the semblance of legitimacy and relevance afforded the PhD¹⁶To say nothing of master's, bachelor's, and a whole host of other types of degrees. have been further undermined almost to the point of abject irrelevance by so-called 'affirmative action.' In all that follows, I will be treating of only that aspect of this scourge upon education that has to do with it encouraging and promoting systemic racism, but let us not forget that it has and still is instrumental in the propping up of a whole, and seemingly ever-expanding, host of supplicants clamoring for entrance into ‘higher learning’ both officially and unofficially. Gender profiling guaranteeing that women get the helping hand that they purportedly need has been in place since the get-go. Certain groups (primarily the sexually deviant comprised of homosexuals and transvestites) have not yet had their demands for lower standards codified into law¹⁷But, oh, are they ever champing at the bit., but the unofficial trend for years has been to perform deviance profiling¹⁸link1 link2 as well. Hence, many (if not all), of the issues addressed in the coming paragraphs could easily be applied to the other beneficiaries of systemic ’isms’ in academia and the workplace. An ad that stipulates just who it is that is encouraged to apply for a receptionist job serves to encapsulate where we are unofficially and where we’re headed officially: “Black people, Indigenous people, people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people; women; people with disabilities, protected veterans, and formerly incarcerated individuals.”

As regards ‘affirmative action,’ it must be readily granted that the left specifically, and those committed to evil practices generally, have an amazing penchant for giving positive-sounding names to abhorrent practices. I believe I have mentioned it in these pages before, but for me, the quintessence of this phenomenon is when the Japanese named their WW II program of rape, torture, murder, human experimentation, and conquest, the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.’ The propaganda father of the godless left, socialist Joseph Goebbels, would feel right at home with today’s ‘social justice’ automatons. A true unpacking of ‘affirmative action’ and its effects leads inevitably to understanding that ‘affirmative action’ is nothing more than the affirmation of a commitment by the government to take action to hamstring educational institutions in the one thing for which they were instituted: education. Hence, because the racial aspect of ‘affirmative action’ is a detestably specious euphemism for ‘systemic racial profiling,’ in order to avoid our becoming complicit in perpetuating such a falsehood, à la Richard Weaver, “all education is learning to name rightly,” it will be referred to henceforth almost exclusively using the acronym ‘SRP.’ When the intent is to refer to all of the systemic profiling schemes that are packaged within 'Affirmative Action,' we will use the acronym SP (Systemic Profiling). Under the rubric of this we currently have SRP, SGP (Systemic Gender Profiling), and SDP (Systemic Deviance Profiling). This list will surely grow in time. As is obvious, academia's SP and the business world’s albatross, the ‘Equal Opportunity Employment Act’ dovetail with one another, almost as if by design: the former ensures lowered standards in academia as a whole, the latter ensures that businesses are forced to hire and perpetuate those same low standards. As a corollary, whenever '<race>' is encountered henceforth, the reader should take it to mean that any or all of the following SRP-friendly ethnic and racial groups should be substituted:

• Blacks
• Hispanics
• Asians/Pacific Islanders
• American Indians/Alaskan Natives

If the reader is offended by the list, or believes it to be racist in origin, I applaud that reaction: it is offensive, it is racist in origin. The next step is to petition your senators and representatives, make the people you know aware of it, and work hard to eradicate SRP operating under the guise of 'Affirmative Action' from the government, for it is the government that is the source of the above list.

It is truly a credit to those who, over millennia, designed, architected, and perfected the university system, and who over a thousand years built and vetted all of the sine qua nons of business, that despite withering attacks both from within and without for well-nigh 60 years, either of them are still standing¹⁹Wobbling, swaying, but still standing.. However, with the foundations almost completely rotted away, absent a reformation, the collapse looms ever larger on the horizon.

The primary impact of the assault by SRP upon education has been to reduce standards across the board and to elevate into positions of influence and prominence those who by definition are not the best and brightest: which begs the question as to whether they are even qualified. Are all unqualified? Who knows, perhaps some aren't. Regardless, it is a blight upon every degree awarded to every person who obtained a degree under the aegis of that program since that time, for in each case, the question naturally arises as to whether there were others more qualified who were denied the opportunity simply because of the color of their skin or ethnicity. What other helps were given that weren't given to others equally or more qualified? No person hinged to reality can affirm that it is good for any group of people to be led to believe that they won't have to work as hard or demonstrate the same proficiency and expertise as others in order to matriculate, let alone graduate, or be hired for a job. And no such person believes that the practices engendered by SRP encourage excellence in anyone: it brings everyone down. The general excellence of the inhabitants of a society is what gives and maintains the life of it. The trajectory of Christendom for well-nigh two millennia was decidedly upward: in the main, it benefited, and the world benefited from the fruits thereof wherever Christianity was proclaimed and practiced. The trajectory is now, and has been for decades, decidedly downward, an assertion which is only denied by the ignorant and the evil. The warp and woof of both of these trends is due, exclusively, to what our civilization affirmed to be good, necessary, or imitable. Arts and letters went hand in hand during the ascent and they have remained so during the descent. As it is invariably the case that it is easier to destroy than it is to create, the destruction wrought has been rapid by comparison.

To people of character, what matters in accomplishment is motive, means, and standards. Thomas Sowell conducted a study on the actual impact of SRP on the groups it is supposed to assist, and his charitable assessment found it to be negligible at best. What has not been negligible is the absolute anarchy it has unleashed upon the institutions originally established by Christians, for Christians, for the furtherance of Christianity. Certainly, the excellence of the university systems engendered by practicing Christians over the centuries was hijacked long before programs like SRP came along, but like most things that are well thought out and well structured, it was no simple matter for the calculating barbarians to dismantle it wholesale, and so during the 1960s many of its virtues remained. Using the Trojan horse of 'inclusion,' the supplanting of existing standards began in earnest and has continued apace since that time. And so they have fallen.

Any person of integrity targeted by this program would be calling for its immediate dismantling and be actively repudiating any such 'assistance,' if not for the sake of affirming what is true and just, at the very least as a matter of personal pride. It is therefore no surprise that the conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, although he acknowledges that he was a recipient of SRP, is an ardent critic of the 'Affirmative Action' that gave rise to it and has categorized SRP as evincing within colleges “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.” NDT has spoken about his experiences of racism while a student, which is ironic because in all likelihood, his very presence as an undergrad on the Harvard campus was predicated upon denying someone of greater ability and accomplishment the spot he occupied solely because of their race, which is the very definition of racism. Therefore, when one reads of those such as NDT who have built their lives upon racism decrying it, one cannot help but be reminded of Samuel Johnson's interrogative "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"²⁰His wry observation on the Revolutionary War in America. By his own admission, he had neither good grades, nor a good SAT showing. It is certainly revealing, considering the low academic standards with which he started and the low standards of intellectual rigor which he currently manifests, that he tells students "Your grades, whatever is your GPA, rapidly becomes irrelevant." Low or high GPA are never irrelevant. What they are is non-deterministic. Excellence is always excellent, and inferiority is always inferior. A person who performs poorly should regret it and commit to doing better. One who performs at a high level should endeavor to meet or exceed that throughout their life. It was the characters that exemplified these principles who built this civilization that was (and in many ways, still is) the envy of the world. By and large, those who inhere excellence tend to continue in that vein, and similarly for those who don't. That being said, exceptions among those who have achieved excellence, who then (most often through moral defect) fall by the wayside, along with those who have done poorly, who then (most often through the inculcation of high moral standards) rise to excellence, while rare, are not unheard of.

While attending the 23rd meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists, NDT engaged in a conversation with other ostensibly black attendees in which they all shared their experiences of as he puts it, “DWB (Driving While Black), WWB (Walking While Black), and of course, JBB (Just Being Black).” One wonders whether the irony ever dawned on these attendees at any point that they were participating in a ‘black’-only event decrying racism? Tellingly, I saw nowhere even the nariest of indications that any of NDT or his colleagues were lamenting "AWB (Applying While Black)" in the context of SRP-enhanced application boosts to colleges, jobs, and appointments. This of course goes to the wider issue of the various groups who have been the beneficiaries of systemic racism for decades screeching ever louder about systemic racism with the end goal being a rebuttressing and expansion of the very things that they supposedly decry. The incoherence is palpable, yet wholly unsurprising from the products of a schooling system that inculcates racism and incoherence.

I’m open to being corrected on my statement regarding NDT’s entire career being propped up by and upon directly contingent racism. That being said, the evidence is in favor of my conclusion. Consider:

1. NDT was admitted to Harvard and subsequently, Columbia, during those heady days when the euphoria from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the so-called Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972, and the Bakke vs University of California SCOTUS ruling of 1978, which taken together mandated racism on the college campus and in the workplace, and then protected it under the Constitution, had not only gathered ample steam but were in full swing.
2. Per his own words, his grades and SAT scores weren’t the highest.
3. The standards of admission in the Ivy League schools were the highest in the land at that time: none but the brightest and most accomplished both in GPA and SAT score need apply.
   1. Unless of course one belonged to the many groups thronging for unmerited admission.
   2. When considering how the doors to higher education were thrown open to unqualified candidates and what has transpired in the ensuing decades, I am reminded here of what John Stuart Mill wrote in On Representative Government about just such a scenario, albeit in the governance of India in the 19th-century: If any door to the higher appointments, without passing through the lower, be opened even for occasional use, there will be such incessant knocking at it by persons of influence that it will be impossible ever to keep it closed.
4. Hence, it would be highly improbable for NDT to have been admitted to any of the prestigious universities without considerable padding being added to his applications to account for his possible intellectual and quite plausible academic deficiencies.
5. If NDT refused to list his race in his applications (or he put some race other than one of the many groups covered by the program) and was the beneficiary of no racist programs geared towards ‘blacks,’ POCs, or whatever the jargon was at that time, please provide evidence of such and I’ll retract my assertion.

The particulars of the aforementioned Bakke v California can be neatly summarized as follows:

• Allan Bakke had twice applied to and twice been rejected by the University of California at Davis’ Medical School in order to make room for less-qualified candidates who had fit the criteria of the SRP policy.
• His GPA was comparable to other admittees across the board, his MCAT scores were all significantly higher than every other applicant across the board.
• When compared to those who were admitted due to criteria other than excellence (e.g., race, gender), he beat every single one on every metric.
• Bakke went on to a residency at the Mayo Clinic.

The Journey of Bob, Jim, and Mark

Generalizing the previous, let us now consider the phenomenon of SRP in toto:

• University X, like all 'good' schools, has supplanted education by social engineering, and therefore has an official policy wherein applicants that meet some racial profile are given a ‘leg up’ on their competition.
• ‘Bob’ applies to X, and his SAT, ACT, grades, and communication skills are all more than sufficient to grant him admission.
• ‘Jim’ applies to X, and his SAT, ACT, grades, or communication skills are not good enough to grant him admission.
  • Jim belongs to one of the groups that will benefit from and which are ardent supporters of SRP in the application process.
• After running the two applications through the racial profiling steps, Jim is granted admission to X. As spaces are limited in any matriculating class, Bob is not. We won’t hear from him again.
• Jim, in keeping with the low to average standards that he had established prior to his admission to X, performs at a level below the typical admittee who was actually qualified. There is an abundance of historical data which bears out this tendency²¹A significantly higher proportion of those students who are artificially admitted into academic programs for which they are not qualified do poorly or end up dropping out.. While certainly possible, it is improbable that Jim will, despite an established history of low achievement for which he was subsequently rewarded, make a miraculous turnaround and perform equally well or perhaps even rise above the others who were admitted on merit. Plus, bad grades really do become rapidly irrelevant if you’re a member of a racially profiled group. NDT was right!
  • Jim is aware that the representation of his race in STEM is below what it ‘should’ be, but when he looks at all of the math courses he’ll have to take, decides against taking that path. He instead chooses a major that is ‘meaningful’ to him and ‘his people,’ i.e., less math and even less physics. A course of study that focuses more on his feelings and perceptions as a member of his race, in essence, he chooses a major that has as much in common as possible with his favorite topic, himself.
  • While at college, Jim starts up a college campus organization (funded at least in part by tax dollars and the tuition fees being paid in full by the non-recipients of SRP) committed to eradicating racial profiling in the United States. He has plenty of time to do this of course because the major he chose doesn’t require much study or time, for he is by definition, already an expert.
• With graduation approaching, Jim, who has been active in stumping against racism the entirety of his undergraduate studies, has learned that there is a disparity between ‘whites’/Asians and his race in some business-related area of study, e.g., an MBA. This underrepresentation grieves him deeply, for it has to be due to racism. He’s further been told that what is needed are ‘strong <race> men’ who will give the much-needed <race> person’s input into that area of study. And the clincher is that there’s good money to be made by those who get an MBA. Wahoo!
  • Unfortunately, as well as not surprisingly, once again, Jim doesn’t have the grades, nor even with taxpayer-funded extra assistance to prepare for his GMAT, his scores aren’t up to snuff (he got a 495). Plus, he doesn’t really have the necessary undergrad core work done because his major was himself.
  • Not to worry! There are programs dedicated to helping the victims of racism such as Jim to guarantee that the much needed and lauded racial profiling process is activated during the application process in order that he have the best opportunity to be accepted into an MBA program.
  • Jim jumps on board with zeal and begins the process. He is relieved to learn that his efforts and sacrifices in founding and helming the organization dedicated to eradicating racial profiling will all but ensure the activation of the SRP process in the review of his applications. He decides on the eminent University Y.
  • In parallel, ‘Mark,’ who majored in a STEM field, has also decided to apply to the MBA program at University Y. His grades are excellent, his GMAT score was 795, and due to him being of a race or ethnicity that does not fit within SRP, there was little to no aid available to him. Instead, he worked part time jobs in order to be able to finish his degree. This left him no time whatsoever to join any clubs or organizations on campus other than STEM study groups. His application also triggers the SRP process, but that in a way different than for Jim.
  • Jim is accepted to Y and is congratulated for his achievement, not only for his discipline, but his hard work, for being true to himself, and for demonstrating that despite all of the racism which he has had to endure, he wouldn’t let ‘them’ hold him down. His gratitude for the SRP that got him admitted to Y motivates him to commit to starting the inaugural chapter on the Y campus of his organization committed to wiping out racial profiling!
  • Unfortunately for Mark, there just weren’t enough spaces available at University Y’s MBA program. We won’t hear from him again. It is not lost on him that the taxes both he paid while working part time as an undergrad and those his parents have paid for decades and will continue to pay, will be used to underwrite and facilitate Jim’s journey at University Y. Once again, NDT was right, good grades do rapidly become irrelevant.
• It is left to the reader’s imagination to furnish the requisite steps in Jim’s journey should he choose to pursue the holy of holies, the PhD.
• Irrespective of whether Jim chooses to remain in the fantastical world of academia tailor remade for him, or to enter public ‘service’ via a government job, or he opts to pursue a job in the corporate world where many of the same policies exist, throughout his life, whenever the news brings before his eyes ‘another’ abominable example of racial profiling, he feels a deep pain for and solidarity with all of ‘his people’ out in the cold, cruel world where fantastical systemic racial profiling is allowed to exist. As a lifetime Democrat, he always votes for those candidates that are the strongest advocates of dismantling the wholly non-existent systemic racism in society at large while simultaneously advocating for increased SRP in the universities and colleges across the land, places of business, as well as government bureaucracies, and who, whenever possible, look the most like him.

The above suffices to demonstrate the incoherence of the beliefs and practices which undergird SRP. Chaotic beliefs and practices can hardly be counted upon to sally forth and upon their return deliver excellence. The repudiation of the standards of excellence makes sense of course. Once the Christian moral foundations of society and upon which the university system was built were largely dispensed with, how could it be other than that the excellence engendered thereof would be next on the chopping block? Who would the model for excellence be? A cacophonous rabble of position seekers each striving to outdo one another in the pursuit of professional victimhood? Hardly. Excellence for the sake of excellence? A pernicious phrase if ever there was one, but don’t scoff at it, for postmodernism provided our entertainment fare with ars gratia artis²²A decidedly nonsensical and aesthetically annihilatory phrase, which at least attempts to affirm the idea of ‘Art’ as something worthy and estimable, but which then does not have the givens to lend it any life or worth., a phrase which has been happily proclaimed for over a century, with a consequence being that we have ended up with those such as Ariana Grande being referred to as an 'artist,' a name once reserved by the saints and philosophers who architected our civilization only for those who exemplified the absolute pinnacle of human achievement in music, literature, painting, architecture, and sculpture. Let your eyes and mind wander over the following list: who doesn't fit? Desprez, Buxtehude, J. S. Bach, F. J. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, …, Ariana Grande.

In addition to dispensing with the overriding raison d'être and essence of Art, postmodernism further told us that truth is relative, a falsehood which the unmoored lapped up with alacrity, primarily because as we are de jure the imago dei, in the absence of our understanding that reality, we become de facto truth definers, each and every one of us defining it as serves our whims²³I.e., I live “my” truth, you live “your” truth.. If truth is relative, it then follows that so are excellence and morality, along with every important and ennobling principle defended and affirmed during the last two and a half millennia of Western Civilization. Education, which at the very least is the training of spirit and mind unto good works, is then also relative. A moment's thought leads ineluctably to the conclusion that all of the aforementioned terms will, by a simple calculus, end up having no definition whatsoever: all semblance of meaning will have been drained from them.

Jim's Journey Writ Small

At each stage of Jim’s journey through the university system, the excellence of the entirety of each class into which he matriculated was diluted with increasing effect: he was propelled into an undergraduate program for which he was not qualified, then boosted into a graduate program for which he was even less qualified, and finally, perhaps, hoisted into a doctoral program where his shortcomings would be all but pathological. At each stage, as his incompetence and inadequacy for the task at hand grew, so did his potential influence upon society at his graduation.

Jim's Journey Writ Large

In the previously referenced article wherein NDT declared that grades are essentially irrelevant, the context was a speech given at the University of Massachusetts where over 1700 master's degrees and PhDs were handed out. Were all of them like Jim? No. But let's say 20% were, which is just about the constituent percentage by race of those matriculating under the aegis of SRP as of this writing at Harvard. This also is in alignment with the percentage of doctorates for those groups from the 2020-21 academic year in the United States as a whole. That means that from the University of Massachusetts campus alone, in a single year, potentially somewhere in the neighborhood of 340 Trojan Horses were unleashed upon the United States.

Jim's Journey Writ Larger

To be frank, the sheer number of advanced degrees being handed out like party favors at the University of Massachusetts shocked me. I thought it must have been a misprint of sorts, so after first verifying that the numbers were indeed correct, I then tremulously endeavored to investigate the total number of advanced degrees being churned out in the United States each year. If I thought that I had been shocked by the numbers out of the University of Massachusetts, I was in for a real doozy: over 200 thousand doctorates and almost one million master's degrees were handed out in the US in the single academic year 2020/2021²⁴link. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of master's degrees handed out increased by 20%. If that trend continues, then by circa 2030, the number of master's degrees printed will be approximately 1.2 million. In keeping with that estimate, the National Center for Education Statistics predicts that by circa 2030, the number of doctorates dispensed is expected to increase to almost a quarter of a million. Assuming a linear trend for both²⁵The following linear equations were plugged into Wolfram Alpha to get the totals: PhD - Sum[5000x + 200000, {x, 4, 13}], Master's Degree - Sum[20000x + 1000000, {x, 4, 13}], this means that in the years 2024-2033 inclusive, there will be an additional 2.425 million doctorates issued, of which almost 500 thousand²⁶According to, approximately 75% of those were issued in non-scientific fields.will have been granted to those likely not qualified, and an additional 11.7 million master's degrees issued, of which 2.34 million will have been granted to those likely not qualified²⁷Even NDT recognizes that "there are idiot PhDs out there.". The real horror is that they believe their opinions on the most important matters facing our civilization to have merit, and that as long as the letters printed on the certificate match up, Jim’s opinion on a matter in some subject is equal to the opinion of a Bob or Mark who met and achieved the highest of standards. All of these ‘feel good’ degree recipients are veritable time-bombs that have been and will continue to be unleashed across the land and fed back into the very system that created them in the first place. It’s actually worse than the previous indicates, as the numbers given are conservative, and this will be seen when the consequences of SRP upon every stratum of academia are explored below.

Jim's Journey Writ Larger: Addendum

As a final consideration for the reader’s imagination to weave into the waking nightmare detailed above, let us add one more factor into the previous analysis: we have, in our fictionalized account of the insidious actual workings of 'Affirmative Action' only considered the racial aspect of it. At each stage, Jim, due to his race alone, was given enough ‘points’ to compensate for his lack of ability or achievement in order to propel him ahead of the Bobs and Marks of the world, but there must be a limit. I don’t believe that the racial profiling apparatus as it currently exists on most college campuses, would bequeath enough points to Jim to allow him, if he were a ‘D’ or ‘F’ student, to matriculate at University X. Let’s say the cutoff at X for the Jims of the world is a 3.2 GPA: any less and even with the SRP bonus, Jim won’t be admitted. But what if Jim’s sister ‘Joan’ applied to X? Well, she’ll get points not only under SRP, but under SGP as well, so maybe for the Joans of the world, the minimum GPA falls to 3.0. What if Joan is a sexual deviant? Still more points under SDP, so, the minimum GPA falls to perhaps 2.8, with the consequence that the disparity between those who matriculate under their own steam, and the recipients of SP in general, grows ever wider. What if Jim and Joan are children of a mixed-race couple, with each race accounted as oppressed? The opportunists are really salivating now…

The Consequences of SRP

Many of those who, like Jim, might not have even matriculated as an undergraduate, go on to become professors and teachers in elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, a phenomenon manifest in the main for at least the past 50 years: each year the standards across all levels of schooling are lowered, the criteria for admission is lowered, the quality of the teachers and professors is lowered, and in many fields (particularly the liberal arts)²⁸I don’t include here either the pseudosciences of e.g., sociology and psychology, nor the wholly artificial and less than irrelevant pseudo subjects such as women’s studies, <race> studies, manifold excursions into various deviancies, and the list grows year by year., the relevance and rigor of the curriculum used is lowered. Another factor that is certainly reasonable, is that the motivation of teachers will be lowered: good teachers like to believe first and foremost that their efforts aren’t being wasted. When perhaps 20% of a class doesn't deserve to be there, isn't prepared to do the work, and of which a significant portion will eventually flunk or transfer out, that motivation will, at the minimum, be blunted. Those who profit from SRP might counter that if those teachers were themselves products of SRP, it follows that their enthusiasm wouldn't be blunted because they'd want to see 'their' people succeed. Putting aside for the moment the inherent racism in such behavior, perhaps that is true, but then the overall excellence has still been lowered because instead of the teacher taking what is excellent and pushing for the boundaries of that excellence to be pushed even further across the entirety of the class, the teacher instead spends his time trying to pull 'his people' up to the bare minimum to pass the class. Finally, the overall standard has been lowered further still through the dilution of the talent pool of each matriculating class. There also is an impact upon the class in general: iron sharpens iron is the old saw, excellence begets excellence, but perhaps even more consistently, dullness begets dullness.

It then follows, as the night does the day, that the deleterious effects of racial profiling aren't simply that an unmerited 20 or so percent obtain master's degrees and doctorates: many of those who were not beneficiaries of racial profiling the way Jim was obtain degrees that are worth significantly less than those of just 10 years ago. Go back 20 years and the disparity is even greater, 30 years, another diminution, and so it goes all the way back to the 1960s or thereabouts. Year by year, decade by decade, the decline continues and accelerates. As of this writing, there are exceptions of course (particularly in those fields with iron-clad standards such as the field of medicine, or those fields where the subject matter is sufficiently abstract, such as mathematics and engineering, to all but guarantee that a winnowing will occur), but only the unhinged are ruled by exceptions in such matters as these.

Those like Jim who don't end up nestling comfortably in academia where they can influence policy to further pad and protect their positions from racism (i.e., accountability and performance metrics), tend to flock into government jobs and appointments, where it is a truism with a long and well-vetted history that those who underachieve have a tendency to gather. Being in an environment such as the free market where, yes, there are government-mandated artificial scaffolds to boost such as Jim in the hiring process, the reality yet remains (at least as of this writing), that in their jobs they will be rated based upon their performance alone without any helps, without any scaffolding, with the sole defense being the bringing of a lawsuit due to 'racism,'²⁹I am not here averring that there have not been legitimate lawsuits brought about due to bona fide racism. What I am stating is that the vast majority of lawsuits brought about in the last few decades at least, have been entirely spurious. and so, jobs where there will be competition on a level playing field with those who did not fit the SRP criteria are anathema³⁰In fact, all standardized tests are anathema, for they deal in and expose reality, and if there is one thing that is anathema to the unhinged left, it is reality.. Indeed, those who have watched even a smattering of the confirmation hearings over the past few years for some of the most influential, impactful, and far-reaching positions of power and authority in the land, have born witness to a veritable parade of nominees who are unable to answer even the most basic of questions about their supposed areas of expertise: these are the natural products of a system hijacked for the purposes of mere advancement for the sake of advancement in the name of ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion.’ The reason why these poorly-qualified candidates continue to be marched across the national stage is the same reason that they continue to matriculate into the finest universities in the land: SRP. And, as is the case with Jim, they will all, with nary an exception, with not even the dimmest bulb of recognition of the contradictory nature inherent within, upon confirmation, dedicate themselves to fighting against the ‘injustices’ of e.g., racial profiling and ‘racism.’

If the courses of study undertaken by such poor academic specimens were constrained to irrelevant subjects such as ‘<race> studies,’ “gender studies,’ ‘indigenous studies,’ or ‘sexual perversion x, y, z, 1/2/3… studies,’ then while not irrelevant in effect, the impact upon society as a whole would be mitigated in no small measure. Yes, it would still be a drain upon resources, creating legions of unhinged people believing that their obsession with themselves resulted in them being 'educated.' Actually, scratch that, it neither would nor could ever be allowed. These drowning souls would be unable to keep their pathologies to themselves: they would, without end, be clawing at and grabbing on to any and all who happened to be afloat, pulling them down into the abyss with them. As Nathaniel Hawthorne puts it in his short story The Bosom Serpent:

Although it is impossible to imagine any scenario in which the inimical effects of the study of such self-indulgent at best, morally abhorrent at worst, topics would not spread their noxious fumes into society at large, it would, by contrast, be a wonderful breath of fresh air if the people who believe that such arenas of study are relevant and important would undertake the truly arduous task of building their own institutions dedicated to these benighted subjects using their own money and their own resources. Of course, it will never happen because it is akin to asking a criminal who is actively looting a department store to build his own store with the sweat of his own brow. I will go one step further: practically speaking, it could never happen. While perhaps metaphysically within the realm of possibility, in the realm of reality, just as there has been no civilization built by atheists, nothing has or ever will be built from the ground up by the unhinged. Vandals (and atheists) operate upon defiling, defacing, and destroying what others have built. There must already be something there.

Speaking of self-indulgence, it is no accident, no mere coincidence, that most, if not all of these entirely irrelevant areas of ‘study’ came hard upon the heels of the ascendency of psychology being meretriciously legitimized in the universities. How many men are clamoring to get a degree in “women’s” studies, how many Caucasians are standing in line to obtain a degree in ‘<race>’ studies? How many normal people are jonesing to get a degree in <insert sexual deviance here> studies? They are all exercises in self-absorption, i.e., the legitimate children of the psychological world view.

In the course of considering all of the above, one might be inclined to think: Whew! because the bar of entry to the really important fields of study in legitimate sciences such as chemistry, physics, engineering, and math is so much higher than the vast majority of other fields, the various profiling schemes operating under the umbrella of SRP have not been able to breech those particular walls, and so we’re safe for now. Let us not be too hasty. When one considers that it was the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric from the trivium, along with music (training in the aesthetic) from the quadrivium which served as the handmaidens to natural philosophy and natural history, which in turn became what the man in the street considers to be ‘science’ today, the non-scientific components of the true liberal arts such as literature, languages, philosophy, and history, I would argue, are even more important, for such studies facilitate the conveyance of the most sublime thoughts of man in the realms of morals, the aesthetic, law, music, etc., and it is these that infuse and suffuse the very life of our civilization. Art is the vehicle through which meaning is breathed into everything that any legitimate science accomplishes, and it is therefore all the more imperative that the barriers to entry for these subjects be at least as high, if not higher than they are for STEM fields. Absent that, man becomes a calculating barbarian, i.e., what the products of the university system in this country have been almost exclusively churning out for decades.

Before continuing, I invite the reader to spend just a few moments pondering the words of Joseph Conrad and Benedetto Croce on what can only be described as their attempt to convey to their readers some of the ineffable qualities of art, and if they be correct, to recognize what a catastrophic loss has been suffered by our civilization:

To the ‘practical man’ of the world, the type who might say ‘the business of America is business!’ or the ‘practical man’ of a science adrift from its moorings, the preeminence in importance of non-scientific legitimate liberal arts is a hard sell, for he is so woefully³²I almost used ‘blissfully’ here, but the situation is so dire, that it would behoove us to all echo the words from Hamlet and “bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe” at the educational state of the typical college graduate from circa the 1970s onwards. uncultivated and unaware of the vast depths of ‘non-scientific’ erudition which undergirds essentially every element of modern life which he enjoys and upon which his very life depends, the idea that there is some purpose behind grammar, rhetoric, the aesthetic, etc. outside of bald utility is lost upon him. He is, for all intents and purposes, practically ignorant.

SRP Impact Analyses

Where does all of this leave us? Well, at the bare minimum, it certainly leaves us with 50 or so years of untold millions of individuals who in all likelihood achieved certificates and accreditations across a whole host of fields for which they were not only not the best and brightest, but in increasing likelihood with the passing of each year for the past five+ decades, not even qualified. But does this really matter? For decades, most people couldn't be bothered to think, let alone care about it. But as large cracks are showing in the dam that keeps chaos and complete ruin at bay, even those 'practical' people are beginning to take notice. The answer to the question is that it really depends upon which fields we survey. Let us consider just a few: medicine, computer science, and from the pseudoscientific arena of study, psychology.

Medicine

Within the field of medicine, in the main, the standards built up, refined, and expanded over the centuries within Christendom set a very high, practically unassailable standard of excellence for American doctors. Part of the reason that there is an aura that surrounds the field of medicine is due to the fact that it has as its chief end a concern with the preservation and enhancement of human life. These unassailably lofty standards are why decade after decade, doctors that came from anywhere else in the world e.g., Russia, India, etc. had to essentially go through another round of medical school, residency, and accreditation in order to be able to practice medicine here. The proof is in the pudding: for all of this time, no one was champing at the bit in order to get to Russia or India (or even Europe for that matter except in the case of unvetted and experimental treatments) in order to get the best medical care. No, those who could afford it were flying to the good ol’ U.S. of A, and I believe that even now that is the case for any number of specialties. Hence, in order for anyone of any race to make it through medical school and residency and to not have passed muster, would be a statistical anomaly at the time of this writing. Of course, because it does represent an incredibly high standard, it must be attacked and remade to be more ‘diverse.’ The only way to do that in the minds of the champions of low standards is to lower the standards. The linked-to article is rich in profundities such as the following:

All of the criteria listed have always been a part of one’s application to medical school: to try to represent it as otherwise is just plain dishonest. What they are really saying is that they want to deemphasize knowledge, which takes a tremendous amount of discipline, focus, and study, for more superficial and unsubstantial criteria: no matter what is done or not done, the applicant can speak highly of their indefatigable efforts and painful sacrifices³³I am not here disparaging volunteer work per se. What I am disparaging are the charlatans who are trying to sell the idea that their anemic volunteerism is a substitute for knowledge in medicine. Even if someone did work hard and sacrifice on behalf of others in a worthy cause, it still would be no substitute.. People can say whatever they want about themselves. But when push comes to shove, the most important thing, by far, is whether one has the necessary knowledge and skill to address the problem at hand. Only the most deplorably unhinged would sacrifice such expertise on the altar of self-obsession, for to prioritize any aspect of one’s self over self-preservation is the very essence of that which is self-annihilatory³⁴One can have little doubt, that when the pitiable transvestite or an adherent of such goes shopping for a surgeon to mutilate themselves or a child, the surgeon is scrutinized to the nth degree. Such is the pathology.. If the unhinged beliefs of these were limited to just themselves, it would still be a tragedy, but they want to inflict the consequences of their festering malignancies on the rest of us as they have been doing since at least the 1950s with a success rate that parallels the rate of moral and intellectual insolvency of the citizenry. To wit:

• “I have a clubbed foot. My club-footedness is what defines me.
• Clubfooted people are underrepresented in medicine due to inherent biases in the application process. Let’s completely revamp and work over everything in medical schools and run campaigns to encourage the clubfooted of the land to enter the medical field. We need to get those numbers up!
• Who knows, who cares? about the cost or impact upon standards across the board: when I go to the doctor, I want to essentially see myself.
• Of course, if everything doesn’t go perfect, perfect! I say, and I don’t feel affirmed and supported, then I’ll sue, sue! I say.”

We can expect the incidence of lawsuits to skyrocket even more than they have in recent decades in inverse proportion to medical standards and practices. It is the love of self to the exclusion of all else that motivates every single one of these efforts to undermine Western medicine. If one expects to see one's self everywhere, then how can such a person ever be satisfied?

Next, we have this scintillating insight into medicine:

We must express deep gratitude to the Slate writers for bringing their penetrating insight and clarity of thought and expression into what was formerly inscrutable. We all thought that doctors were simply automatons. Apparently, it's important for a doctor to be able to communicate with their patients. Of course, a nice bedside manner is a bonus, but when it comes to an individual’s or their loved one’s health, to anyone able to pull themselves away from their morbid gazing into the mirror of self, niceties at the bedside recede into irrelevance as compared to expertise. ‘Empathize’ is simply a byword for ‘self’ in all of these discussions:

Only a <race> doctor can feel my unique pain. Oh, they grew up middle class? Unacceptable. My doctor must be <race> and have grown up in the same type of neighborhood that I did. What?! They speak proper English? That can’t be. They must speak like me. What?! They don't engage in sexual perversion <x>? Impossible! What?! They believe that only 'women' have female reproductive organs? Lawsuit! What?! They’re only half <race> and some other race? They won’t be able to relate to me.

And on. And on. And on it will go until the doctor is as close to one’s distorted mirror image as possible, or, as is more likely, the whole enterprise collapses in on itself, taking all of us with it, for the self is all that matters to the unhinged.

And finally, this:

Translation: the obsession with self is at a critical mass in society. Rather than espouse other-centeredness and do the real work of seeing if we can make the standards in medicine even higher, let’s exert the minimum effort necessary and infect every aspect of society with our corrosive views and beliefs. The severity of their moral and intellectual myopia is such that they are incapable of discerning the impending danger to both self and society.

While these assaults upon standards of excellence were already rebuffed and refuted on general principle alone earlier in this article, as it is the case that examples are always helpful, I will add my personal experience on this very phenomenon of <race> representation in medicine.

My closest friend growing up belonged to one of the races that fit the criteria for SRP. In high school and college, he was the first to admit that he wasn’t the brightest amongst the four of us who had formed a strong bond³⁵Incidentally, and to us, irrelevantly, this group consisted of one who is ethnically European, one who is ethnically Mexican, one who is ethnically African, and one who is ethnically Asian., but whether he was correct or not, I remember him to be quite bright. When it came time to apply to college, he was admitted into a school that far exceeded what one would have reasonably expected given his GPA and SAT scores. To his credit, he relatively quickly established rock-solid study habits and consequently far exceeded the pattern established in high school, and if I recall correctly, in organic chemistry (the class which historically served as a pons asinorum for pre-med students) he was ranked the second highest. It was his girlfriend who occupied the top spot and from whom he had learned how to study. She fit the criteria for SRP as well, but, from what I recall, in high school she had had a 4.0 GPA and a stellar SAT showing, i.e., she would have more-than-likely matriculated at that university under her own steam. My friend graduated college with a high GPA, attended an Ivy League medical school, did his five-year residency at an Ivy League teaching hospital, and then finally, did a further two-year fellowship in vascular surgery at one of the top programs in the nation. However unexpected his admission to his undergraduate university was, it was not typically one that would lead to admission to an Ivy League medical school, yet he did get in. Once he was on the Ivy League track though, there really was no limit other than intelligence, discipline, and hard work.

While there are numerous takeaways from the previous, the most significant to the topic at hand are:

1. Via exposure to high standards of achievement along with what it takes to meet such standards, people can turn things around.
2. His girlfriend had no need for any special programs: her natural intelligence, hard work, and discipline were all that was needed.
3. Superficially, one might conclude about my friend: “See? SRP made him a vascular surgeon!” Probe just a little bit further and it is obvious that
   1. Absent SRP, his non-matriculation at his undergraduate alma mater would have been due solely to his lack of hard work, not racism.
   2. If he had instead attended a junior/community college (or a less prestigious four-year university), he still could have turned things around and become a vascular surgeon purely on merit, with no shadow of racial profiling attached to either his undergraduate or medical school admissions.
   3. If he failed to turn things around, he would not have been rewarded for his lack of effort and discipline.
   4. Whatever one says about my friend: the fact of his girlfriend’s accomplishments and success belie any attempt to prop up any need for racial profiling in college admissions.
4. Standards of excellence are infectious and propel people to strive to reach their potential.

Computer Science

Turning our attention to what is termed ‘computer science,’ has racial profiling lowered the standards of candidates entering the workforce as programmers?³⁶Whatever the answer is to this question, it will be the same for the standards of computer science professors, yes? Also, all of the below discussion on computer science is exclusively concerned with graduates of American computer science programs. Discussing standards outside of the United States is beyond the scope of this article, but there is no doubt that the hundreds of thousands of workers from India, China, etc. with degrees in this field have a definite impact upon the industry. In terms of education, the answer, per all of the previous, is an obvious 'yes,' but I will be here concerned with the technical aspect, i.e., the ability to perform general programming tasks. It will be seen that in evaluating computer science, we are in essence putting a stake into the ground as to what the real standard bearer is for legitimate arenas of study in the realms of math and science. In so doing, we will touch briefly upon certain aspects of engineering curricula in general.

In the gamut of fields of study such as mathematics and the engineering sciences, the required aptitude for critical thinking, abstraction, and problem solving is rather high. In computer science, less so. The general intelligence and aptitude for all of these traits in a typical engineering³⁷Electrical, mechanical, nuclear, chemical, etc. or math graduate is much stronger than in a typical computer science graduate. Of course, there certainly are graduates in computer science who could have excelled in one of the engineering disciplines³⁸And, it must also be borne in mind that given the 'buzz' around computing and programming in recent decades, computer science has drawn in some extremely strong candidates, many of which I have been blessed to work with.: I am here speaking of a typical graduate. This makes sense of course because the required coursework for an engineering or math degree is much more difficult than it is for a computer science degree. As an example, there is no comparable required course for a standard computer science degree that approaches anything in the realm of the difficulty of thermodynamics. Because of classes such as that and others, there is a more aggressive weeding out process that takes place in the engineering schools than in the computer science school.

Because it is considerably easier to get a degree in computer science than engineering, the weeding out process that takes place there is primarily due to the calculus and linear algebra requirements (and on a lower scale, data structures) which are not as aggressive or effective as that which takes place in the engineering and pure and applied math disciplines. This is appropriate of course, because many programming tasks don’t require what mathematics and engineering require.

So, per the detailed analysis previously about the inevitable fall across the board of every discipline, there can be no doubting that the standards for a computer science degree are lower than they used to be. However, because of the requirement for certain courses that require at least some measure of mathematical aptitude, there is a point at which the standards can’t go any lower. The only way for the standards to go lower would be to eliminate the math requirements.

The question then becomes: how does industry deal with this problem as the overall quality of the typical CS graduate has fallen? Startups have more leeway, and therefore, poor candidates are more likely to be weeded out early in the interview process. This is helped in large measure by the fact that in the early-stage startups, there is no HR, so candidates can be viewed solely through the lens of the engineering staff. But, both startups and larger, established companies follow essentially the same pattern of determining an applicant’s fitness for the position:

1. There is an initial test typically given by a recruiter to gauge whether a candidate meets the bare minimum in terms of competence.
2. One of the engineers speaks to the candidate to gauge the basic ‘fit’ of a candidate for a position and gives a more difficult test.
3. At this point there will be interviews and more architecture-related questions from other engineering staff. If the position is for basic coding, there will only be a single round of this.
4. Usually, a final interview with the team lead or manager.

While it is true that the interview process is largely concerned with vetting that the candidate’s manifest skills are in alignment with the resume, there is also a kind of IQ test being administered as well throughout. I say ‘a kind of IQ test’ because thanks, once again to SRP-esque practices, IQ tests, while not outlawed per se, became such a minefield of potential lawsuits from the demagogues and race baiters, that most companies banned them. Objective standards are, once again, anathema.

Considering the slow but steady advances made in the assaults upon the standards of medicine, if we come to a point where the MCAT has been kicked to the curb, you can bet your bottom dollar math standards are on the chopping block, and then there will be no limit to just how poor a CS candidate can be. In fact, the chiselers are already working on it.

Psychology

When one undertakes a consideration of psychology with an eye as to standards, the earnest enquirer is met immediately with having to contend with the public perception of it having been stamped with the authority of science. Let it be stated at the outset, that the only way in which psychology can be considered to be scientific would be to drain the whole of 'science' of validity itself³⁹Yes, it has already occurred, but if some order could be brought, we could claw some ground back.. In essence, to move the goalposts such that either team can score a goal by exerting the barest of effort to nudge the ball either upfield or downfield. Score! Psychology is in many ways, in fact the most important ways, a sibling of evolution: the true sciences such as thermodynamics, astronomy, aeronautics, chemistry, etc., all are natural heirs of what used to be termed 'natural philosophy.' Psychology is an unnatural heir of what used to be termed 'natural history.' Without taking a very long detour into the history of science, suffice it to say that the latter was far less rigorous and theoretical than the former. As will be seen shortly, that still holds. To avoid having to continually put 'science' in quotes when referring to psychology, or saying 'true science' when discussing legitimate science, from henceforth in this discussion of psychology, it will be rightly referred to as 'pseudoscience⁴⁰Which is what it and evolution were rightly called for many decades prior to the goalposts being moved to accommodate the inherent weaknesses that inhere both.,' and science is, well, just ‘science.’

All science has predictive power. When studying the mathematics of chaos theory, I remember being impressed with how accurately the partial differential equations used to describe the trajectory of objects in space could be. Practically to within inches over millions of miles, as long as the initial conditions were correct: modify them by the tiniest amount, and somewhere down the line, you'd get chaotic behavior. Psychology has zero predictive power about individual human beings. Zero. Other than platitudes about general human tendencies that have been enunciated for millennia by practically every culture under the sun, it can make no predictions about a given individual’s actions in any given situation that almost anyone who has a modicum of experience dealing with the vagaries of life and humanity could not make if they knew a person's past behavior and tendencies.

Another fundamental aspect of science is that it leads to the formulation of general theories of phenomena that apply to all such phenomena with equal accuracy. No one would call aeronautics a science, if given the inputs for just about any aircraft, accurate predictions about fuel consumption, time of travel, expected heat dissipation on the wings, shear forces, and literally thousands of other metrics, could not be made without resorting to new equations and whole studies to be undertaken in order to obtain such data for each individual aircraft. Put another way: instead of Newton having derived a general hypothesis for falling bodies, he had come up with a hypothesis for one rock, which would need to be revised for the next rock, which would then need to be revised for the next rock, ad infinitum. The previous is a high-level overview of what the philosopher Peter Caws discusses in his lecture What Psychoanalysis (Psychology) is the Science of⁴¹Part 1 and part 2. Published 25 years prior to Peter Caws' lecture, an essay written by the physicist Eugene Wigner made a complementary point about the essentially miraculous nature of the consistency to be found in scientific formulations, in particular, the agreement between highly abstract theoretical work in quantum mechanics in regards to the hydrogen atom being found to be applicable to the helium atom years afterward:

Taken together, it becomes obvious why psychological ‘help’ involves session after session after session over a period of oftentimes years to arrive at anything definitive. Usually wrong, usually pernicious (except when it has liberally borrowed from Christianity). Critically, even with years of 'therapy' no predictions, no 'calculus' of a John or Jane Doe will have been defined. Anyone who has been paying attention has seen that many (all?) of the perpetrators of mass murder, serial murderers, etc. of late have almost to a man, been recently or currently under the 'care' of some variant of psychologist who has demonstrated the same incapacity to predict the behavior of their patient as anyone else.

The only math requirement to obtain a degree in psychology is what amounts to basic statistics. Considering that mathematics is the language of science in general, it then follows that not only are there no requirements for any science classes, there couldn't actually be any. So, the next time you hear a psychologist speaking on the statistics of this or that, understand that what they are saying might be true, false, or indifferent, but unless they are a highly-unusual psychologist, they have zero to little understanding of the principles of the mathematics upon which the statistics they cite depend.

Most people have been hoodwinked into believing that there is scientific validity to psychology because not only has it been repeated from sunup to sundown over and over again that it is a science, but also because most psychology journals make use of statistics, have graphs, are full of arcane jargon, and contain some statements which comport with reality. Question: if e.g., the journals associated with the field of comparative literature began to regularly publish analyses on the uses of tropes, metaphors, sesquipedalian words, etc., accompanied with statistics and graphs, was chock-full of arcane jargon, and contained true statements, would that make comparative literature a science? What if the researchers wore white coats, would it be more scientific then? Hardly. Simply because an activity or undertaking apes various tools and methods of science does not make it a science.

Now that we've pulled the curtain back on the scientific pretenses of psychology, one might be inclined to think that I believe that only science-based subjects are valid. Incorrect. Previously in this article, I pointed out the absolutely essential and vital nature of the true humanities, subjects which are even more necessary and fundamental than are the sciences in the grand scheme of things. The problem with psychology is not just that it's not science, but also that it falsely presents itself as being so, and that there is almost no legitimate and relevant conclusion its adherents state about the human condition that wasn’t lifted wholesale from Christianity without so much as a footnote of acknowledgement. When a realm of inquiry wants to be accounted as legitimate, but then starts off with a falsehood, and then further draws all sorts of inferences based upon that falsehood, shouldn't the falsehood be first rectified and the conclusions that were drawn upon that falsehood be reevaluated? Yes. As I've pointed out elsewhere, while it is the case that occasionally true and relevant statements do appear in the murky depths of the unplumbable oceans of psychological literature, it is with only the rarest of exceptions, in cases where it has simply plagiarized from the past.

As if all of the above wasn't enough, even with the flimsy requirements mandated to obtain a degree in psychology, the thronging masses have clamored that even that is too high of a bar, and for those that want to pack in the baloney more tightly, the GRE portion of many (most?) of the master's programs in psychology has been waved. The description of the GRE is rather humorous to anyone with a background in science: "subject tests are content-based exams that assess a person's mastery of a particular field of study, such as physics or psychology." It's kind of like saying that there's a test to assess a person's mastery of pole vaulting or sitting in a chair. So, as to the question of whether SRP has eroded the standards of psychology, the answer is 'yes,' but they were already so low, that it's quite difficult to gauge how far it has fallen.

If, as Gauss said, mathematics is the queen of the sciences, then the decided analogue is that psychology is the queen of the pseudosciences⁴²The king assuredly being the evolutionary speculation.. The number of morbid fields of study in self-absorption and self-'discovery' all draped in the robes of pseudoscience lent them by psychology has exploded in the decades since psychology triumphed in overwhelming the weary and battered⁴³Muggeridge's appraisal. rear-guard of Western Civilization with its claims of legitimacy.

In conclusion, it is therefore the case that SRP and all such programs whether they be used to shackle universities or businesses, are, per their design, incapable of helping anyone to accomplish anything of worth that they wouldn’t or couldn’t have accomplished on their own. In any field of study with a sufficient level of abstraction, participants in this artificial matriculation who do not have the ability to do the coursework will either

1. Flunk out of the program
2. Switch to a less demanding major
3. Flunk out all together

For those rare exceptions which in some limited measure a beneficiary of SRP has ostensibly been helped, the cost to everyone else at every level and aspect of society is catastrophic. It cannot be overstated; it cannot be denied. To the self-absorbed, this matters not one whit. Their ignorance and wholesale adoption of the Rousseauean evaluation of man's nature and the Whig interpretation of history essentially entails that they will operate under the belief that everything gets better in and of itself except for those pesky anomalies still occasionally brought to the fore concerning Christianity's role in making Western Civilization⁴⁴The study of which has receded so far into the background that what used to be a requirement is now practically a derided specialty.. To the unhinged, who are essentially feckless passengers on a ship designed, built, guided, and maintained by others, what reason could they possibly have to conclude anything other than it will all just work out? If it doesn’t, well it will be due to, of course, anything other than personal responsibility, for that is anathema, welfare and handouts are a ‘right.’

Refutation of SRP

Contra SRP's emphasis on attenuating personal responsibility and amplifying handouts, in the main, past generations held that personal responsibility was one’s duty and welfare and handouts were anathema. My father was wont to say, "Everyone born in this country is born with a silver spoon in their mouth." This coming from a man who was born and raised in abject poverty, surrounded by violent alcoholics, who had as one of his earliest memories coming home from school to find his mother knocked out cold lying in a pool of blood. He falsified his age in order to escape that environment and entered the military at the age of 16, in which he was the employ for a period of three years⁴⁵One of which was compulsory due to war.. Upon his honorable discharge, he worked graveyard shifts in a variety of jobs over a period of years while attending school during the day, catching sleep when he could, in order to obtain the necessary college accreditation for his chosen career. Upon completing that college work, he had no debts, and it certainly wasn't because of any taxpayer funded welfare program paying his way. Neither he nor my mother had any debts upon their respective deaths. They carried none in their life. Paid as they went.

A more recent example of sand and tenacity comes from my college years. At that time, I worked in the math tutorial center. In that capacity I met and became friends with an immigrant from Vietnam who had come in to get help with the calculus class that covers infinite series (essentially 'Calculus II') . There are several things in particular that I remember about him.

1. His amazing tenacity and work ethic
2. His gentle and soft-spoken way
3. No matter how hard he tried, he could not get above Cs or Ds in Calculus II

I had done well in that class. I had to work hard, but had done well. Up until that time in life, I had naïvely believed that absent rare exceptions, essentially everyone had the same intelligence, the same ability to do whatever they set their mind to. That tenacious, kind, and no-excuses young man taught me that some people, no matter how hard they worked, are not able to understand mathematics beyond a certain level of abstraction. His reasons for failing to reach his objective were not because calculus is a product of some nonsense such as 'colonialism,' it was because he just didn't have the natural givens for that area of study. A line from the inspiring movie Chariots of Fire comes to mind here: "you can't put in what God's left out." This young man came from a culture that was as backwards in respect of Western Civilization and the Western intellectual tradition as was or is any African culture or sub-culture in the United States. Yet, many of his fellow immigrants did very well in classes just like that. No special programs, no handouts: nothing. No excuse making for the curriculums being 'biased.' Nope, they just put their heads down, were thankful for the opportunity, and were astoundingly successful. Plus, the schooling systems in existence in the countries from which those such as he were desperate to escape, made the typical public school attended by those beating a drum for more money and resources in this country look like Oxford and Cambridge by comparison. However, it must be granted that the destruction of the family unit, largely at the behest and impetus of the psychological world view, certainly has made academic success all but impossible for many of these groups, for it is inordinately difficult to succeed in the midst of familial chaos. The answer to this horrific problem, of course, is not SRP-esque plaisters over festering wounds, but rather, a return to the morals of the Christian faith which built and made the whole enterprise possible in the first place.

In the final analysis of SRP, the only reasonable conclusion is that it is championed by demagogues for the reasons that demagogues do what they do, fools who like to feel good about themselves and can't be bothered to do any reading or research on a topic⁴⁶I.e., 'virtue signalers,' to which a large proportion of the voting public belong., and by those with a lack of drive, lack of aptitude, or both, who look with envy upon those who have achieved some measure of success. On this last point, I have a very clear memory of when I was working full-time and attending college classes in the morning before I was due at work. Because of the prohibitive cost of on-campus parking, I parked several blocks away. Each day as I went to and from the school, I walked through a so-called low-income (public housing) neighborhood and invariably I'd see people just lounging about, smoking, drinking, radios and TVs blasting out into the street, what have you, and even then I recognized, that if someday I were to have a house or a nice car, those exact same people, would, almost to a man, decry the ‘unfairness’ of my material possessions. It was not lost on me that my tax dollars even at that very moment were putting a roof over their heads, food in their refrigerators, clothes upon their back, providing medical care, and the list goes on and on. The absolute dire criticality of emphasizing and extolling rigorous academic standards in legitimate subjects cannot be overemphasized. Nor can hard work and industry be over-extolled. The same goes for standardized tests, for as respects them, the bottom line is, contrary to the agitators, poor scores on standardized tests disproportionately affect only those who do not do well on them.

SRP: Who is Being Racist?

Taking into consideration all of the previous discussion of SRP, would it be ‘racist,’ to in general, prefer an Asian or Caucasian doctor to one who belongs to a group that fits the SRP criteria? At this time, probably so, although lingering doubt about how one's doctor got into pre-med and med school would be legitimate. When it comes to the health of one and one’s family, who can be blamed for wanting only the absolute best given the choice? Of course, if the push to eliminate the MCAT or to reduce standards further in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ succeeds, one would need to have one’s head examined to not prefer a doctor who did not meet the criteria for SRP. But in such a scenario, in attempting to make a determination, an infinite regress would be unavoidable.

If I or a loved one needed an operation and the surgeon happened to be someone who fit the criteria of SRP, and my research indicated that he had graduated at the top of his class academically or some such unpaddable criteria, I’d be the first in line to say “Get me that surgeon!” in preference to any other doctor who had not accomplished such an impressive feat, irrespective of race. Absent that, the generalization holds. Those who currently match one of the groups on the <race> list who don’t like the irrefutable logic of this should be working to stamp out SRP in college admissions and the workplace.

In closing this section out, I’ll list some fields other than medicine where one would think that only the absolute best would do:

• Law: whether it be the lawyer who is going to defend you against a false charge, the judge overseeing your trial, or a supreme court justice.
• Military: the strategists who are entrusted with ensuring that our defense networks at every level are operating at the very highest standard.
• Police: your child has been kidnapped, do you want the best detective possible, or someone who makes you feel good about yourself, and ‘affirms’ your image of self?
• Air traffic controllers: your plane is flying into an airport, do you want the best, or is diversity worth an unparalleled ‘diversity’ of plane crashes?

Q: What kind of person would be willing to risk a diminution in standards to any of the above (and many others) in any capacity?

A: The unhinged, i.e., those who support democrat policies.

For those fields and careers which are not so dire, or which don't have built-in abstraction safeguards, is it racist to wonder whether one who matches SRP criteria was quite likely not as qualified as someone who did not match the SRP criteria? Of course not. It’s an acknowledgment of the reality that exists at this time. Anyone who tells you different is a racism profiteer or just a plain fool.

The PhD/NDT Outro - The Frock has No Scientist

NDT's Scientific Papers

Circling back to NDT, in terms of his contributions to astrophysics, we had seen that his PhD thesis had been rarely cited. In how many papers subsequent to his thesis has his name appeared as a contributor? I found nine:

• A 9-page paper from 2007 in which his contribution was ranked #8 out of 8 total
• An 8-page paper from 2006 in which his contribution was ranked #50 out of 55 total
• An 8-page paper from 2006 in which his contribution was ranked #22 out of 22 total
• A 13-page paper from 1997 in which his contribution was ranked #21 out of 30 total
• A 30-page paper from 1996 in which his contribution was ranked #50 out of 81 total
  • His contribution amounted to submitting a few readings from a piece of equipment
• A 19-page paper from 1994 in which his contribution was ranked #44 out of 44 total
• A 9-page paper from 1994 in which his contribution was ranked #18 out of 18 total
• A 5-page paper from 1993 in which his contribution was ranked #1 out of 4 total
• A 7-page paper from 1993 in which his contribution was ranked #1 out of 2 total

When one examines NDT’s list of publications, it is painfully clear that whatever NDT has been doing for the past 33 years as of this writing since he got ahold of his PhD, he has not been working as a scientist in astrophysics or otherwise. In only two papers published (way back in 1993) could his contribution be categorized as anything other than trivial. Of the two articles in which he is listed as a primary author, one has been cited 22 times and the other a single time. In accordance with the trivial gaining primary focus amongst the demos, he is referred to as an 'astrophysicist' but has not done, does not currently do, and highly likely will not ever do any important research in the field in which he obtained degrees. Most likely due to the paucity of scientific work done by him, he is not listed on Google Scholar. Or, perhaps, NDT might try to convince us that the real reason behind there being no entry for him on Google Scholar is due to "PWB (Publishing While Black)"?

NDT lists all of the papers enumerated above as his ‘research publications.’ To list something as such when the sum total of one's contribution consisted in taking a handful of readings from a piece of equipment is akin to the guy who delivered pizza to a movie set putting on his resume that he was a co-director of the movie. It would be more honest to state: ‘publications in which my name has appeared.’ It would show more intellectual and academic sand to list only those publications in which a major contribution had been made, but that would leave barely two entries. It is an obvious act of vitae padding to include those publications in which one's contribution is at the very penumbra of discernibility. But then, the educational and societal trends that made those like NDT, have emphasized image to such a point that substance exists only as a platform upon which to apply the pancake makeup of image. On the rare occasion that the substance is revealed, it turns out that it is nothing more than an image itself, the portrait of Dorian Gray. Given the probity of the typical denizen of the West, the thickness of the makeup necessary to hide Dorian has decreased as of late.

Who is the Scientist?

For comparison, let us consider the astrophysicist Alexei V. Filippenko: he earned his PhD from Caltech in 1984 and since that time he has published almost 1100 papers. Although I couldn’t find any data on how many times his thesis has been cited, I found it revealing that it is 311 pages long⁴⁷Which is, revealingly longer than the sum total of all of NDT’s nominal research publications over a 30+ year career as a ‘scientist.’ and he is the sole author⁴⁸Only his advisor’s name appears along with Filippenko’s.. He is, according to the Caltech alumni website, one of the most cited astrophysicists. Google Scholar indicates that he has been cited 194 thousand times and that his h-index is an astronomical 187.

Who is the scientist? Who have you heard of? For my part, prior to one of my sons bringing my attention to Dr. Filippenko, I knew nothing of him. The reason most people have heard of one and not the other is because one is engaged in science, and the other is engaged in proselytizing the mouths-agape masses. This disparity between the demagogue and the scientist reminds me of how many more people have heard of Richard Dawkins, the bloviating pseudoscientist, yet a comparatively tiny number would recognize the name of Francis Collins, who headed, what many people consider one of the greatest undertakings and accomplishments of science, the Human Genome Project. Dawkins is an atheist with no actual scientific accomplishment whatsoever, Collins is a Christian with arguably the greatest scientific accomplishment in all of human history under his belt. The former is lauded and applauded because of his adherence to moral chaos, the latter is comparatively unknown because of his adherence to morality. Referring to NDT as an 'astrophysicist,' is analogous to calling everyone who has a PhD in Phys Ed an 'athlete,' or everyone who has a PhD in Music a 'musician.'

It is telling that if one does a search for 'greatest astrophysicists of all time,' the names of 'Carl Sagan' and 'Neil deGrasse Tyson' appear in the first result returned by Google:

That either of them appears at all is a testimony to how poorly Google curates its data, or is it rather a glowing testimony to how well they shape their data to accomplish a certain end? That they appear in a place of prominence merely serves to underscore the previous. The absence of Dr. Filippenko is scandalous, although my guess is that a scientist such as Dr. Filippenko could care less, which is the right attitude. In the final analysis, I could care less as well, because in evaluating any purported statement of fact, I always consider the source, and as we've learned, the 'source' is and has been in a sharp decline. I only point it out to demonstrate how unhinged from reality the top results from search engines can be. In scanning the list above, approximately 30% of those listed have no business being there. The sum total of their contributions to astrophysics amounts to even less than NDT's so-called contributions to seven of the nine papers he lists on his website. In perusing other lists returned by the search, NDT almost always appears, and sometimes Dr. Filippenko: democracy does 'science.'

Standards Adrift

To further underscore how the collapse of educational standards has resulted in no stone being left unturned in the pursuit of uprooting and burning standards of greatness, the previous query and its distorted results about astrophysicists reminded me of a search I had done recently: 'greatest symphonies ever.' Upon clicking on the top result, I wondered where Beethoven's Choral Symphony would appear in the list, his Fifth, the genre-busting Eroica, the Seventh? What about Brahms' 3rd and 4th? Would Camille Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony appear? How about Tchaikovsky's plaintive and tragic Pathetique? The top result threw me a bit: Mozart's 41st. OK, I thought, the editors have a penchant for Mozart. It is indeed a great symphony, beautiful, and as Haydn said of Mozart "He has great skill, but more importantly, he has taste" and I believe that is certainly one arena in which Mozart eclipses Beethoven, but really, the number one spot? Considering that Beethoven's symphonies have long been considered the absolute apex of the genre, and Brahms avoided composing a symphony until he was in his fifties due to his apprehension as to whether he could ever compose a symphony that would not be unfavorably compared with Beethoven's, it's essentially impossible to rationalize, but fine, let's move on. The number two greatest symphony brought forth over the course of the past 300 years to declare the glory and supremacy of the art of Western Civilization to the world? Florence Price's Symphony No. 1, a composer who just happens to have been a black woman. Well, the jig is certainly up at this point. I listened to it. It shows that she had some skill in composition, but no gift for it. The top ten is rounded out by a symphony composed by Louise Farrenc, a woman who "was unable to attend composition classes at the Paris Conservatoire, as they were only open to men." Of course, while it certainly is within the realm of possibility for a <race> woman to compose a symphony that would rank amongst those composed by the masters, to date, no woman has even approached what was accomplished by them. To be fair, no man has approached what the masters did either. Obviously, classicfm.com needs to make some revisions to their list, because I didn't see any transvestites. An outrage! To have such commonplace works, artificially vaulted above dozens if not hundreds of other works, manifests a detachment from reality, a lack of education, or a nihilistic commitment to hoisting into places of prominence that which is substandard in the pursuit of what amounts to the quintessence of ideology. The mind that would compile such a list, treating as equivalent, works that exemplify the very height and aspirations of human achievement in art, and what comparatively amounts to what can only be accounted as the uninspired craft of a middling journeyman at best by comparison, is the same mind that would applaud a ‘performance’ of John Cage’s 4’33”, consider Ariana Grande an artist, and perhaps, even believe that NDT is a scientist.

Lesson? Cast a shaggy and hoary eyeball upon all such lists of 'greats' that have been compiled after the 1960s. More than likely, the wheat will have become very chaffy.

Meet NDT the Marketing Guy

I have no personal animus towards NDT, I have never met the man. He has merely served as an archetype for the phenomenon where a PhD is obtained, followed by supporting morally abhorrent positions, then being lionized and feted as a scientist. As stated previously, I have no doubt that he's intelligent. I also have no doubt that he's cunning and has maneuvered himself into being "America's personal astrophysicist."⁴⁹His words. He sometimes makes very valid points about any number of topics, but then he almost invariably spins off into uttering platitudes and amorphous bromides. That being said, if I turn my mind off and simply listen to him, I think he's actually an excellent communicator. His enthusiasm and laughter are infectious. He's articulate, and if the cameras were off, and he would commit to putting aside some of his phony-baloney schtick, I'd enjoy having a beer and conversation with him.

In the final analysis then, who or what is NDT? As stated previously, he is a vocal cleric of the scientific faith. But within that morally chaotic religion, more or less distinct roles can be discerned. I propose that rather than him being a scientist or an engineer, he is more akin to the ‘marketing guy’ for scientism. There are lots of excellent people in marketing who obtained degrees in engineering and then for whatever reason decided to be marketers. They have enough of a technical background to be able to ask pertinent and intelligent questions about the products architected by the engineers and scientists, the answers to which they then relay to the public and customers, but have no part in the actual theoretical and practical work needed in order to bring the product into the light of day. NDT is like that with astrophysics. People like Dr. Filippenko do the very hard, abstract work in mathematics and physics, and people such as NDT and his mentor Sagan report it to the masses. It’s the same with Dawkins in biology: brilliant and talented biologists and geneticists do the heavy lifting, which Dawkins then incorporates into his marketing material. Because the masses can’t tell the difference between the work and the reporting on the work, they fall down and worship.

As to NDT’s⁵⁰He certainly is not alone in this! predilection for ultracrepidarianism, that’s a natural consequence of his obvious lack of training in logic and metaphysics along with the unchecked pride that invariably accompanies the morally unhinged world view of scientism. Contrary to what the common perception is about degrees obtained in mathematics and the sciences, even if one has obtained a PhD in e.g., physics as did NDT, it does not mean one has any idea about the logical and metaphysical underpinnings of science, nor is any of that part of the normal curricula for mathematics, the engineering sciences, and physics. Really, one doesn’t even need a strong understanding of logic: the majority of the coursework is purely deductive in nature, and where induction is encountered, it’s usually only in proofs, and as is well known, physicists aren’t really that interested in pure math. Abduction will never be touched. So, unless one is taking a bunch of extra classes in addition to the crushing requirements to get a degree in those subjects, one must put in the effort on one’s own time. All of the previous on the emphases and lack thereof on the various types of inference, apply across the board to mathematics, the engineering sciences, and physics: graduates of these programs have been trained in the discovered and derived facts of their respective fields, they’ve been taught how to use the mathematical and other ‘machines’ of those fields, but they have not been taught really much of anything about science per se. There is nothing I have encountered in what I’ve read that was authored by or listened to of NDT that manifests that he has done the extra work necessary⁵¹It could be that for some obscure reason he's doing his best to hide his knowledge of it really well.. It then follows that because he doesn't really understand what science is, nor has he made a career of practicing science, he’s come to believe that if someone gets a degree in e.g., psychological ‘science,’ well then, that person is a ‘scientist’ just like him, and as such, when such a person tells him that the XX-XY chromosomes are ‘insufficient,’ well, it’s 'science' and he faithfully submits to it, and then markets it to the masses, who, once again, bow down and worship.

Of the manifold phony-baloneys manifested by NDT, the most obvious one is that he is a 'black' man. What he is, is a mulatto man. To deny this would be to deny the evidence of one's own eyes, which is actually one of the hallmarks of this and recent generations. If NDT is going to identify as something other than simply a 'man' in a manner comporting with some semblance of reality, he would identify as mulatto, or of mixed ancestry, or as 'brown' as did Billy Dee Williams recently, who stated that all people are people of color, and when one of the panelists on The View labeled him a 'black' man, he was understandably puzzled, paused, and then said, "Well, a brown-skinned man?" He rightly refused to be pigeonholed, and in that instance, declared what is real. It is indeed sad that we must call out and commend the rare instances in the media of adherence to the real, but that's where the materialist train has brought us. NDT's own mother, apparently more in touch with reality than her son on this fact of the world, recognized that her children are brown. As to my use of 'mulatto,' I refuse to get dragged down into the mosh pit of manic competitors all vying to crowd surf their way to the 'Most Offended' crown. According to the hernia edition of the Merriam-Webster's dictionary published prior to the editorship being taken over by those interested in pushing unhinged agendas, 'mulatto' is neither vulgar nor offensive, it is simply a fact. The same goes for the OED's definition for 'mulatto'. Yes, there are terms that were once considered inoffensive which are now considered offensive, but here is the difference: in the past, the process of change was preponderantly conservative, meaning 'thoughtful,' 'measured,' and 'non-reactionary.' What is transpiring now is more akin to iconoclasm, and no thinking person should play ball. And yes, of course, we should be careful to not purposefully offend others. But, we must also recognize when the censure of a term is motivated purely by malice or cupidity, especially when enunciated by those who feel free to disparage every sacrosanct term and concept under the sun with impunity.

No moral person cares whether NDT is black, brown, or of some other complexion. The preference is that people like NDT simply identify as a 'man' and stand on their own two feet instead of pretending to hobble around on swindler crutches. The primary reason anyone identifies as something other than just a 'man' or a 'woman,' is to take from others that which they neither merit nor have earned. If NDT is mulatto in the sense of having Caucasian and black African biological ancestry, then why not identify as 'white?' From all of the previous, the answer should be obvious: there is no cachet at this point in time in so identifying. Plus, frankly, it would be strange to do so, for he doesn't look 'white.' Of course, nor does he look 'black' either, certainly if one surveys what the inhabitants of Africa look like without the infusion of European blood. The real cash lies in the entitlement that comes with identifying as 'black.' It is telling that on the one hand the unhinged try to convince us of the patently false assertion that gender is on a ‘spectrum,’ while on the other hand, when it comes to race, where there exists a true and verifiable spectrum, they have essentially drawn a line in the sand: if you have even a smidgeon of <race> in you, and there is profit in declaring so, well then you’re <race> alone. From a purely selfish-motive perspective, I can certainly understand the whys and wherefores of NDT and those of his persuasion for such inconsistencies and their concomitant grabs for cash and power in the midst of the confusion wrought by them, but at least spare those of us who are funding it the draping of it in the elevated language of righteousness, truth, or justice.

Speaking of cash and swindling, when Barack Hussein Obama was elected, rather naïve people were proclaiming that such an election meant that the United States could finally declare that racism was as good as dead, and that it would recede into the mists of memory and time. My response to such an insipid statement was to make the point that as long as cries of 'racism!' were profitable, it would never recede. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that NDT considers Obama to be the person to have had the 'most profound effect on society' in the past several decades. Well, here we are, coming up on two decades after Obama's first term, and business has never been so good. It's no coincidence that the Obama's have made cash hand over fist by keeping the 'profound' SRP dream alive.

Concluding Matters

It is a sign of the times that the typical denizen of the West, even if presented with the accomplishments of someone such as Freeman Dyson, when faced with the attainments of the typical PhD recipient in physics, would either grant the latter primacy over the former, or just as awfully, grant equality of merit. A veritable triumph of form over substance if ever there was one. This has occurred and is occurring across just about every endeavor of merit, a phenomenon I term The Great Equivocation. Exhibit A? Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is akin to someone drinking tea with an elevated pinkie and eating dainty cakes making a passing comment upon their distaste for slavery, being considered by that very act to be in the pantheon of great men who fought and dedicated their lives to ending the slave trade as did William Wilberforce. That prize used to be infused with meaning and relevance: celebrated farces such as Obama being awarded it, drain it of both henceforth. For now, those who bestow the prize must be accounted as unhinged.

In summary, let me make clear what I did not say, for oftentimes, this is the most important. I did not inveigh against all PhDs. Rather, I hold that most PhDs serve as a hindrance to the furtherance of knowledge as opposed to being a help. Nor did I say that the opinion of one who has a PhD is entailed to be worthless or useless. To the contrary, if we're considering a PhD in a relevant field, most of these opinions are relevant in such a narrow band, that while they are practically worthless, they are not necessarily essentially so. Do your research. Don't fall prey to the idolatry of curricula vitae, or its progenitor argumentum ad verecundiam. The type of person who believes that a PhD necessarily imparts anything of relevance is the same type of person who believes that graduating from college is equivalent to being educated. Post hoc ergo propter hoc notwithstanding, the number of PhDs influencing and directing public policy has increased at almost the same rate at which the health and vitality of our civilization has decreased.

I did not say that NDT is incapable of, nor that he never has, made statements which are true and relevant. One of the stamps of authenticity of the inauthentic is that their word salads contain enough of what is true in order to be not obvious frauds to the man on the Clapham omnibus, and so it is with NDT.

I also did not say that racism does not exist. In fact, a significant portion of this paper has been about the very real systemic racism that currently holds sway across the land. Nor did I say that <race> people are not intelligent or that they are incapable of obtaining degrees in relevant subjects. I would like all people who are qualified to be the best that they can be in whatever it is for which they have an aptitude. If someone doesn't have the aptitude, drive, discipline, and desire for something, why force it? The whole enterprise is deplorable and we must applaud the efforts of Clarence Thomas who said of his own race: “I believe blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators.” Amen.

Finally, I did not say that all degrees are invalid. A significant and growing number of them are. All of them, some more than others, evince a collapse of standards across the board. Just as the collapse of our moral standards have led to the collapse of the standards of the mind, the collapse of the two taken together have led to the inevitable imperilment of the once vaunted and enviable university system created by Christendom that shined as a beacon to the entire world, which in turn did its best to imitate it. The effects of the ongoing collapse of that institution cannot be measured nor adequately described. What Paul Valéry said is fitting here: “everything which must be said, is almost impossible to say well.” Bearing that in mind, we can certainly say that it is cataclysmic.

This cataclysm was brought about by us. For it was us who opened the gates to the barbarians by inviting them into our homes through unfettered access to the media, then into our churches, our schools, our universities, and our cities, followed by electing into places of power those who perpetuated the very policies that we now decry and are suffering the effects of but which then we had not the wit to recognize. Sure, at the time, it felt good to be so irresponsible, so magnanimous, so generous with our ignorance and apathy: look around, does it still feel good? Even Rousseau recognized that apathy is inexcusable when he wrote in Discourse on the Arts and Sciences "In politics, as in morality, it is a great evil not to do good. And we could perhaps look on every useless citizen as a pernicious man." The spiritual, intellectual, and financial debt we have accrued is immense. Are we going to pay it, demonstrate that we have the bare modicum of wisdom to do our part to right the spiritual and intellectual peril the ship of state is in, or will we behave like the very barbarians we rightly deride, ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ought to bear⁵²Washington's Farewell Address? Will Durant said that a critical difference between the civilized person and the barbarian, is that the latter has no vision, nor does he make provision for the morrow. The time to act is now, there is no quick solution, there is a lot of work to be done. Decades of apathy and neglect cannot be fixed with a single election: the people of Germany, having abandoned Christianity believed that and so elected Hitler. The tides of violence are rising. We must not put our hopes in a man, but in the morals and principles that blessed us with every good thing under the sun and then seek to elect those that manifest those same principles in their words, actions, and lives. The bill for the overthrow and subjugation of not only us, but our children, and their children, is due and payable and it will be paid, in some measure by us, but upon our deaths, if anything's left standing, the bill that we accrued will be paid predominantly by them.